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Mannerism discovered through having Luiz inspire an examination of Sonnet 18Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Temporal time & thee
Thou art more lovely and more temperate: attributes [eventually of life]
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, time of spring
And summer's lease hath all too short a date: logical return to brief short summer season now
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, attributes of heaven, of life
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; life becoming death
And every fair from fair sometime declines, individually, by necessity. the imperfection of relationship
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd; nature = life-temporal (deaths) indiscrimination
But thy eternal summer shall not fade eternal time implies eternal ripeness and life for her, him
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; and her, his property of beauty (which is on lease in temporal life)
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, The temporal condition would transcend life, but Death will receive no copy
When in eternal lines to time thou growest: because "Eternal" written lines cause her, him to burgeon
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, Unity of temporal life & attributes in men
So long lives this and this gives life to thee. That implement these words of life "to thee"Themes : Principal one is the dichotomy of temporal life vs. eternal life Thus words like death can imply
eternity while nature and life imply death.
Death in life and life after death. Lovely image from Greek mythology, Euridice, imitating Hades.
Orpheus theme of the poet's "lines" : his words, his music, his strings and his orderliness compared to
the chanceness of abundant ever-dying nature. Also the Orpheus theme in that life for Euridice depends
upon the eyes [and ears] of breathing men.
There is a comparison between the beloved's perfection and the grace of art which is supperior to nature
and thus is eternal.
To make a good job of this as Luiz hints, one ought to follow up on attributes as distinct from
movement, of time:day- seasons; life-decay. But the Orpheus - Euridice theme contents me and slants
my belief since he desires to look in this direction, that a woman was probably the object. A mature
woman. If I am not mistaken Emilia Bassano Lanier was too young at that time for it to have been her.
Could it have been his wife when she was still fair to him?The reality of Shakespeare's image as I believe he imagined it, the concentration that he can put to bear
and his word values are at least as significant as his power of emotionalizing. We are not dealing with a
Romantic poet, but the best of the Renaissance where form is pervaded by life and not the opposite. This
may be too manneristic for your taste. But it is his intricacy that fascinates me even when I do not gage
all of it.
Posted by Florence Amit on April 10, 1997 at 22:48:57
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